U.S. swimmer Mark Spitz wins 7th gold medal

Year
1972
Month Day
September 04

U.S. swimmer Mark Spitz wins his seventh gold medal at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich. Spitz swam the fly leg of the 400-meter medley relay, and his team set a new world-record time of 3 minutes, 48.16 seconds. Remarkably, Spitz also established new world records in the six other events in which he won the gold. At the time, no other athlete had won so many gold medals at a single Olympiad. The record would stand until Michael Phelps took home eight gold medals at the Beijing Games in 2008.

Mark Spitz was born in Modesto, California, in 1950. He began receiving instruction in competitive swimming at age six, and by age 10 he held 17 national age-group records and one world age-group record. When he was 14, his family moved to Santa Clara so Spitz could train with George Haines of the celebrated Santa Clara Swim Club. At age 16, he won his first of 24 Amateur Athletic Union championships and at 17 took home five gold medals at the Pan-American Games in Winnipeg, Canada.

Having set 10 world records by the time of the 1968 Summer Olympics, the 18-year-old Spitz brazenly predicted that he would take home six gold medals from the Mexico City Olympic Games. Actually, he won just two gold medals, both in team relay events, and took home a silver in the 100-meter butterfly and a bronze in the 100-meter freestyle. Humbled, he went to Indiana University in Bloomington to train under Doc Counsilman and prepare for the next Olympics. At Indiana, he won eight individual National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) titles and was named World Swimmer of the Year in 1969 and 1971. By the time he graduated in 1972, he was ready for the XX Olympiad in Munich, West Germany.

Spitz was expected to dominate at Munich, but the 22-year-old star had learned his lesson in Mexico City and made no predictions. His actions spoke loudly enough. On August 28, his spectacular victory march began with an easy victory in the 200-meter butterfly. The butterfly was his signature stroke, and he set a new world record of 2 min. 0.70 sec. That same night, he won his second gold as a member of the U.S. 400-meter freestyle relay. He swam the anchor leg, and his team finished in a world record 3 min. 36.42 sec. The next day, he won his third gold medal, with a world record time of 1 min. 52.78 sec. in the 200-meter freestyle.

He swam the 100-meter butterfly in 54.27 sec. to earn a world record and his fourth gold medal, and then anchored the 800-meter freestyle relay team to victory for another gold medal and world record. He considered pulling out of the 100-meter freestyle out of fears he would be bested by teammate Jerry Heidenreich but then went ahead with the race, finishing a half-stroke ahead of Heidenreich in a world record 51:22 sec. He had won his sixth gold medal, surpassing the medal record held by Italian fencer Nedo Nadi, who had won five gold medals at the 1920 Olympics in Antwerp, Belgium.

The capstone of his gold medal sweep came on September 4, when his 400-meter medley relay team won the gold. After the victory, Spitz’s teammates lifted him on their shoulders and carried him around the pool in a victory lap.

Before Spitz’s great achievement could fully sink in, however, tragedy stuck at dawn on September 5 when Palestinian terrorists attacked the Israeli quarters in the Olympic village, killing an Israeli coach and wrestler and taking nine other Israeli team members hostage. Spitz, who is Jewish, was put under armed guard and then flown from Munich to London out of fear he might become a target. The nine Israeli hostages were eventually killed.

Spitz received a hero’s welcome in the United States and with his good looks was hailed as a sex symbol. He made a fortune from endorsements contracts, but a hoped-for movie career failed to pan out. He lost his amateur status and rarely swam in competition after 1972. In 1992, at age 42, he launched a comeback bid but failed to qualify for the Barcelona Olympics. He was inducted into the International Swimming Hall of Fame in 1977 and was a member of the first class of inductees into the United States Olympic Hall of Fame in 1983.

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Massacre begins at Munich Olympics

Year
1972
Month Day
September 05

During the 1972 Summer Olympics at Munich, in the early morning of September 5, a group of Palestinian terrorists storms the Olympic Village apartment of the Israeli athletes, killing two and taking nine others hostage. The terrorists were part of a group known as Black September, in return for the release of the hostages, they demanded that Israel release over 230 Arab prisoners being held in Israeli jails and two German terrorists. In an ensuing shootout at the Munich airport, the nine Israeli hostages were killed along with five terrorists and one West German policeman. Olympic competition was suspended for 24 hours to hold memorial services for the slain athletes.

READ MORE: When World Events Disrupted the Olympics

The Munich Olympics opened on August 26, 1972, with 195 events and 7,173 athletes representing 121 countries. On the morning of September 5, Palestinian terrorists in ski masks ambushed the Israeli team. After negotiations to free the nine Israelis broke down, the terrorists took the hostages to the Munich airport. Once there, German police opened fire from rooftops and killed three of the terrorists. A gun battle erupted and left the hostages, two more Palestinians and a policeman dead.

After a memorial service was held for the athletes at the main Olympic stadium, International Olympic Committee President Avery Brundage ordered that the games continue, to show that the terrorists hadn’t won. Although the tragedy deeply marred the games, there were numerous moments of spectacular athletic achievement, including American swimmer Mark Spitz’s seven gold medals and teenage Russian gymnast Olga Korbut’s two dramatic gold-medal victories.

In the aftermath of the murders at the ’72 Olympics, the Israeli government, headed by Golda Meir, hired a group of Mossad agents to track down and kill the Black September assassins. The 2005 Stephen Spielberg movie Munich was based on these events.

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Harry Truman dies


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Original:
Year
1972
Month Day
December 26

On December 26, 1972, former President Harry S. Truman dies in Independence, Missouri.

Then-President Richard Nixon called Truman a man of “forthrightness and integrity” who had a deep respect for the office he held and for the people he served, and who “supported and wisely counseled each of his successors.”

Truman was born in Lamar, Missouri, in 1884. The son of a farmer, he could not afford to go to college, so he too worked as a farmer before joining the army in 1916 to fight in World War I. After the war, Truman opened a haberdashery in Kansas City. When that business went bankrupt in 1922, he entered Missouri politics. Truman went on to serve in the U.S. Senate from 1934 until he was chosen as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s vice president in 1945; it was during his Senate terms that he became known for his honesty and integrity.

Upon FDR’s death on April 12, 1945, Truman became the 33rd president of the United States, assuming the role of commander in chief of a country still embroiled in World War II. With victory in Europe was imminent, Truman agonized over whether to use nuclear weapons to force Japan to surrender. Just four months into his tenure, Truman authorized the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan in August 1945. He and his military advisors argued that using the bombs ultimately saved American and Japanese lives, since it appeared that the Japanese would fiercely resist any conventional attempt by the Allies to invade Japan and end the war. The use of the new weapon, dropped on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in early August, succeeded in forcing Japan’s surrender, but also killed, injured and sickened thousands of Japanese and ushered in the Cold War.

Although harshly criticized by some for his decision to use the devastating weapon, Truman also displayed integrity and humanitarian virtues throughout his political career. In 1941, Truman drove 10,000 miles across the country in his Dodge to investigate potential war profiteering in defense plants on the eve of World War II. As president, Truman pushed through the Marshall Plan, which provided desperately needed reconstruction aid to European nations devastated by the war and on the verge of widespread famine. He also supported the establishment of a permanent Israeli state.

Truman served as president for two terms from 1945 to 1953, when he and his wife Bess happily retired to Independence, Missouri, where he referred to himself jokingly as “Mr. Citizen.” He was hospitalized on December 4, 1972, with lung congestion, heart irregularity, kidney blockages and failure of the digestive system. He died on December 26. A very subdued and private funeral, fitting for the down-to-earth Truman, was held in Independence according to his and his family’s wishes.

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President Nixon launches space shuttle program


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Original:
Year
1972
Month Day
January 05

Richard Nixon signs a bill authorizing $5.5 million in funding to develop a space shuttle. The space shuttle represented a giant leap forward in the technology of space travel. Designed to function more like a cost-efficient “reusable” airplane than a one-use-only rocket-launched capsules, the shuttle afforded NASA pilots and scientists more time in space with which to conduct space-related research. NASA launched Columbia, the first space shuttle, in 1981.

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H.R. Haldeman encourages Nixon to ward off FBI

Year
1972
Month Day
June 23

On June 23, 1972, President Richard Nixon’s advisor, H.R. Haldeman, tells the president to put pressure on the head of the FBI to “stay the hell out of this [Watergate burglary investigation] business.” In essence, Haldeman was telling Nixon to obstruct justice, which is one of the articles Congress threatened to impeach Nixon for in 1974.

In audio tapes of that day’s conversation in the Oval Office, Haldeman tells Nixon that the press and FBI investigators have come close to linking the men who burglarized the Democratic National Committee headquarters in 1972, housed in the Watergate building, to the White House. They specifically mention funds diverted to the burglars, many of whom were Cuban, by members of Nixon’s re-election committee.

Nixon tells Haldeman to tell the FBI that the funds in question were intended for the CIA and concocted a story about covert plans regarding communist Cuba. “Don t lie to them,” said Nixon, “to the extent to say there’s no involvement [on the part of the president] but just say this is sort of a comedy of errors, bizarre, without getting into it.”

The tapes of the hour-and-a-half conversation between Nixon and Haldeman eventually brought the down the Nixon administration and led to his resignation in August 1974. They were considered the “smoking gun” which proved Nixon’s role in obstructing justice during the Watergate investigation.

READ MORE: 7 Revealing Nixon Quotes From His Secret Tapes 

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George W. Bush is suspended from flying with the Air National Guard

Year
1972
Month Day
August 01

On August 1, 1972, future President George Walker Bush, son of former president George Herbert Walker Bush, is suspended from flying with the Texas Air National Guard for missing an annual medical examination.

Bush’s military-service record became a source of controversy during the 2000 and 2004 elections, and underwent further scrutiny when he launched a controversial war in Iraq in 2003. Although Bush served in the National Guard, many opponents of the war, including veterans, criticized the president for a sketchy military record, which, it was alleged, contained extended and inexplicable absences of six months to a year at a time. Bush defended his military record by saying he satisfactorily completed all of his military obligations.

Bush was given an honorable discharge from the Air National Guard in 1973 to attend Harvard Business School. Still, some veterans and war opponents equated Bush’s stint in the National Guard and his subsequent Harvard attendance as tantamount to a Vietnam War draft deferment procured by his politically influential father. Bush’s harshest critics went even further, claiming that Bush’s military records may have been tampered with or forged to create a positive military-service record. According to analyses by historians and investigators, however, Bush’s military records do not substantiate this or some critics’ claims that Bush ever went AWOL (absent without leave).

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Hopalong Cassidy rides off into his last sunset

Year
1972
Month Day
September 12

After nearly 40 years of riding across millions of American TV and movie screens, the cowboy actor William Boyd, best known for his role as Hopalong Cassidy, dies on September 12, 1972 at the age of 77.

Boyd’s greatest achievement was to be the first cowboy actor to make the transition from movies to television. Following World War II, Americans began to buy television sets in large numbers for the first time, and soon I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners were standard evening fare for millions of families. But despite their proven popularity in movie theaters, westerns were slow to come to the small screen. Many network TV producers scorned westerns as lowbrow “horse operas” unfit for their middle- and upper-class audiences.

Riding to the small screen’s rescue came the movie cowboy, William Boyd. During the 1930s, Boyd made more than 50 cheap but successful “B-grade” westerns starring as Hopalong Cassidy. Together with his always loyal and outlandishly intelligent horse, Topper, Hopalong righted wrongs, saved school marms in distress, and single-handedly fought off hordes of marauding Indians. After the war, Boyd recognized an opportunity to take Hopalong and Topper into the new world of television, and he began to market his old “B” westerns to TV broadcasters in Los Angeles and New York City. A whole new generation of children thrilled to “Hoppy’s” daring adventures, and they soon began to clamor for more.

Rethinking their initial disdain for the genre, producers at NBC contracted with Boyd in 1948 to produce a new series of half-hour westerns for television. By 1950, American children had made Hopalong Cassidy the seventh most popular TV show in America and were madly snapping up genuine “Hoppy” cowboy hats, chaps, and six-shooters, earning Boyd’s venture more than $250 million. Soon other TV westerns followed Boyd’s lead, becoming popular with both children and adults. In 1959, seven of the top-10 shows on national television were westerns like The Rifleman, Rawhide, and Maverick. The golden era of the TV western would finally come to an end in 1975 when the long-running Gunsmoke left the air, three years after Boyd rode off into his last sunset.

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Ziggy Stardust makes his earthly debut


Year
1972
Month Day
February 10

It was one of those events that virtually nobody witnessed, but many wish they had: the concert at London’s Toby Jug pub on February 10, 1972, when the relatively minor rocker named David Bowie became the spaceman Ziggy Stardust. While it might be said of many such historic moments—like John meeting Paul at a backyard birthday party, or Elvis ad-libbing “That’s All Right (Mama)” between takes at Sun Studios—that their significance became clear only in hindsight, there was at least one man who knew exactly where Ziggy’s earthly debut would lead: David Bowie himself.

“I’m going to be huge,” is what David Bowie told Melody Maker less than three weeks earlier and still six months prior to the release of the album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. “And it’s quite frightening in a way, because I know that when I reach my peak and it’s time for me to be brought down it will be with a bump.”  That last bit may have been a case of Bowie confusing his Ziggy persona with real life, but that was what put the act over in the first place. Any rock musician can put on a costume, but how many could have inhabited the identity of an androgynous Martian rock star come to Earth in its dying days so convincingly, so effortlessly?

Bowie has credited two men with serving as his inspiration for creating Ziggy Stardust. One was the man he met and spoke with after his first Velvet Underground concert and took to be Lou Reed, but who was, in fact, Reed’s replacement in the Velvets. “He sat there and talked as though he was Lou and he was talking about how he wrote ‘Waiting For The Man’ and all these things!” recalled Bowie years later. “And it was at that point that I realised that, at the time, it didn’t matter to me if this was the real one or a fake one.” The other inspiration was Vince Taylor, an obscure figure to Americans, but a figure well-known in late-60s London as a former pop star very publicly losing his mind. “He fired his band and went on-stage one night in a white sheet. He told the audience to rejoice, that he was Jesus. They put him away.”

From this mix, Bowie created the persona and groundbreaking album that offered “a finger up the nose of pop sincerity…a boot in the collective sagging denim behind of hippie singer-songwhiners” and made his career. As one of the roughly sixty young Londoners in the audience that night at the Toby Jug now recalls, “Bowie had brought theatre to a humble pub gig….I couldn’t blink for fear of missing something—nothing would ever be the same again.”

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Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Godfather” opens


Year
1972
Month Day
March 15

On March 15, 1972, The Godfather—a three-hour epic chronicling the lives of the Corleones, an Italian-American crime family led by the powerful Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando)—is released in theaters.

The Godfather was adapted from the best-selling book of the same name by Mario Puzo, a novelist who grew up in New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen and got his start writing pulp stories for men’s magazines. Controversy surrounded the film from the beginning: Soon after Paramount Pictures announced its production, the Italian-American Civil Rights League held a rally in Madison Square Garden, claiming the film would amount to a slur against Italian Americans. The uproar only increased publicity for the movie, which Paramount was counting to become a big-money hit after the success of Puzo’s novel.

The studio’s production chief, Robert Evans, approached several directors—including Sergio Leone and Costa Gavras—about The Godfather before hiring the relatively unknown Francis Ford Coppola, who was only 31 years old at the time. As an Italian American himself, Coppola strove to make the film an authentic representation of the time period and the culture, and to do justice to the complex relationships within the Corleone family, instead of focusing primarily on the violent crime aspect of the story. He worked with Puzo on the screenplay and persuaded Paramount to increase the budget of the film, which the studio had envisioned as a relatively meager $2.5 million.

Perhaps most importantly, Coppola and Puzo fought to cast Marlon Brando in the coveted role of Vito Corleone. At the time, Brando’s career had been in decline for a decade, and he had become notorious for his moody on-set behavior, most notably during the filming of 1962’s Mutiny on the Bounty. When Paramount insisted that Brando do a screen test, the legendary actor complied because he wanted the role so badly. Reading his lines from hidden cue cards, Brando turned in a phenomenal, intuitive performance as the Godfather, winning an Academy Award for Best Actor (which he declined to accept). Combined with Coppola’s meticulous direction and memorable performances by the rest of the film’s cast, including Al Pacino, James Caan, Robert Duvall and Diane Keaton, Brando’s star turn propelled the film to record-breaking box-office success, as well as three Academy Awards, for Best Actor, Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay.

The Godfather has remained a perennial choice on critics’ lists of the all-time best films in history. In 2007, it ranked second on the American Film Institute (AFI)’s list of the greatest movies of all time, behind Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941). Its sequel, The Godfather: Part II, was released in 1974 and won six Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director. A third installment, The Godfather: Part III (1990), received some positive reviews but was generally considered to be the weakest of the three films.

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Jet crashes after takeoff at Heathrow, killing 118 people

Year
1972
Month Day
June 18

On June 18, 1972, a Trident jetliner crashes after takeoff from Heathrow Airport in London, killing 118 people. The official cause of this accident remains unknown, but it may have happened simply because the plane was carrying too much weight.

As the summer of 1972 approached, there were serious problems facing the air-travel industry. Pilots were threatening to strike any day due to lack of security. Hijackings were becoming more common and pilots were feeling particularly vulnerable since they most often bore the brunt of the violence.

However, on June 18 at Heathrow Airport outside of London, all appeared to be running smoothly. The BEA morning flight to Brussels was full and weather conditions were perfect. The Trident 1 jet took off with no incident but, just after its wheels retracted, it began falling from the sky. The plane split on impact and an intense fireball from the plane’s fuel supply erupted, scattering the fuselage and passengers. Only two of the 118 passengers and crew members on board were pulled from the wreckage alive; both died just hours later.

All efforts to explain the crash were fruitless. The investigators’ best guess was that the jet simply was carrying too much weight or that the weight was improperly distributed and the plane could not handle the stress.

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